Amazon Outage Shows Limits of Failover 'Zones' 125
jbrodkin writes "For cloud customers willing to pony up a little extra cash, Amazon has an enticing proposition: Spread your application across multiple availability zones for a near-guarantee that it won't suffer from downtime. 'By launching instances in separate Availability Zones, you can protect your applications from failure of a single location,' Amazon says in pitching its Elastic Compute Cloud service. But the availability zones are close together and can fail at the same time, as we saw today. The outage and ongoing attempts to restore service call into question the effectiveness of the availability zones, and put a spotlight on Amazon's failure to provide load balancing between the east and west coasts."
Re:have your own servers (Score:5, Informative)
So wait. The cloud sales pitch is "no more servers-save money-cut IT staff" but now its:
1. Virtualized servers in zone 1
2. Virtualized servers in zone 2
3. Virtualized servers from a different company altogether.
So I went from one solid server, good backups, maybe a hot backup, and talented staff running the show to outsourced to 3 different clouds with hour-long hold times with some Amazon support monkey? Genius.
Re:sounds like TWCs DNS servers (Score:3, Informative)
...and get slow performance on anything delivered via Akamai or similar services which try to use regional data centers.
OpenDNS and Google DNS are hacks that work increasingly badly.